by Roger Levy
There was something nagging at her, had been since she’d got here, and it took her a moment to work it out: Tallen wasn’t in tonight. Not that it mattered, now she had Bale, but even so, there had been a sense of curiosity about him that she seldom found. She was sure he’d have made a good story. She’d thrown out that line from Macbeth and he’d jumped on it. And the way he’d described the rigyards, there was definitely something to him. Odd, too, for Cynth to appear undecided, giving her both men at first as material for Razer to tell a TruTale. Bale was way out of the ordinary, of course, and Cynth, with her AI logic, had been right to bring her here, but yes, if it hadn’t been for Bale…
She turned her full attention back to the Paxer. Something was off with him tonight, but she couldn’t fix the reason. Usually it took a few drinks, a story or two for her to catalogue later, maybe a smile to be raised from him, and the evening was done. But not tonight. Tonight Bale had drunk steadily without showing anything of the alcohol except an unusual reflectiveness. There was nothing relaxed about him, though.
He said, ‘You like it here on Bleak, Razer?’ Saying it like an accusation.
She made a non-committal gesture.
‘Don’t just do that. Tell me. What do you like about it?’
‘It’s peaceful,’ she said.
‘I’m not in the mood for jokes. What do you like here?’
‘Usually I like drinking with you.’
For an instant she could clearly see Bale in a cell with someone who’d given a wrong answer. It made her shiver. She said, ‘I like the sea. I like the wind and the noise. It’s a good place to think.’
‘The eye of a storm. That’s what you told me the first time we met.’
She said, ‘Did I?’ though she remembered it perfectly. ‘Has something happened, Bale? You’re in an even fouler mood than normal.’
As he stared past her, she noticed how the non-screeners in the bar fell silent at his gaze. The same thing had happened that first night when he’d pushed through the door and let her catch his eye. He’d interviewed her like a suspect for an hour, drinking soft while she drank hard, as much as telling her no one comes to Bleak without a very big reason, and then he’d given up the questioning and started drinking vavodka with her, catching up and then overtaking her within fifteen minutes.
She’d never met anyone like Bale before, anywhere in the System. They’d slept together three times, the second time to see whether the first time was just because they’d been too drunk, and the third time to see if being sober the second time had put too much pressure on them. Razer had known it was never going to work after the first time, but she’d become fond enough of Bale to want to let him work it out for himself. She had to see if he was strong enough to let some kind of friendship surface from the wreckage of their sex. It had taken him a few weeks, but it seemed like he’d made it, though you could never tell with men.
It was an odd sort of friendship. She made sure Bale knew he was being mined for stories, but it didn’t seem to bother him. It was obvious to her that he had few other friends on Bleak. And – though it was a pity – he was professional enough to give her nothing identifiable or sensitive. He was good at his job, she was certain. She just wondered why he did it here. He wasn’t fit for anything else except soldiery, but there were thousands of better places to live in the System than Bleak. Cynth had sent Razer to most of them and she’d never found anywhere worse.
Thanks to Bale, though, she knew a little more about the rigs than could be trawled from the Song, and about life on Bleak. Cynth had chosen him well.
‘You ever think about life?’ Bale said now, a faint slur to his voice.
She bit back a flippant answer. One of the few personal things she knew about Bale was that he didn’t think much about anything outside his work. That was one of the things that usually let her relax so well with him. That perfect focus would make him good at his job, but it made him vulnerable too. If everything was black or white to you, you’d be blind to grey. For Razer, everything was a shade of grey.
‘I think about life,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘I’ve been thinking. The Administrata, the Corps, Pax, it’s like they’re all in an airlock with a single inrush of air. Too many people, just one source of oxygen from a high corner.’
She nodded, glancing idly round the bar. Still no sign of Tallen.
‘By the air, the Generals and the Presidents are standing on everyone else, breathing just fine, pissing and shitting down.’ Bale was almost all the way drunk, squinting at the damp rings on the table. ‘Below them there’s a little piss and shit, but the air’s still pretty good. A few bodies lower, the air doesn’t taste so fine. Near the bottom, it’s all shit, the air’s foul, they can’t move for the pressure from above, but they’re alive.’
Razer started to say something, but Bale held up a hand.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘the people at the top need the ones at the bottom in order to get their mouths to the best air, and the ones a bit lower down have their eyes fixed on the breathable air. They don’t care about the top, never will, and they don’t care about the bottom, never will.’
He dealt himself another drink. One of the barstaff came and scooped a few of their empty glasses away and wiped the table in a single smooth move. Razer tried to acknowledge the service, but the staffer kept his gaze to himself.
She wondered what to say, not sure how to gauge this mood of Bale’s. In the end, she said, ‘It’s simple, but it’s a fair metaphor. Most people die at the same level they’re born on. Is this your philosophy of life?’
‘It’s how it is.’
She tried a small laugh. ‘Where are you, then?’
Bale blew a long breath of scummy air and said, ‘In a goddamn bar with you, as usual. You need another drink and so do I.’ He drained his glass and slapped it down on the refill pad, and swore at the sudden bloodcheck warning shining on the pad.
Razer had never seen him quite like this before. As lightly as she could, she said, ‘Well. It looks like we’re both walking.’
‘Hell to that. I look drunk to you?’
‘No, Bale. A drunk never looks drunk to a drunk.’
Bale slid his index finger into the table’s blood slot, watching the screen light up and reading the result.
MACHINERY PRIVILEGES WITHDRAWN. PLEASE RETEST IN FOUR HOURS IF CEASING ALCOHOL INTAKE NOW. HAVE A GOOD EVENING, OFFICER BALE.
‘Hell to that, too,’ Bale said. He held his glass at eye level for a count of ten and then drained it evenly. ‘Is that fine motor control or what?’
Razer gave up and grinned. ‘It looked fine to me.’
He pulled a new drink and drained it, the empty glass hitting the bar before the bloodcheck display had flicked from four hours to four fifty.
‘Maybe we should slow down just a little,’ Razer said.
‘Doesn’t matter to me. I’m not working tomorrow.’
The tone of his voice had changed again. She said, ‘No?’ Bale stared at the empty glass until she said, ‘Day off? When did you last have one of those?’
‘Suspended.’
‘What?’ Razer put her own glass down, suddenly halfway back to sober. Had she missed something? ‘Why?’
‘Insubordination.’
She relaxed a little. ‘So, what? A week? You just have to take it easy, Bale. Didn’t you say this happens to you every month, sure as night?’
‘Yeah. Maybe I’ll go home. Sleep.’
She caught his look and laughed aloud, breaking the mood. ‘No. That won’t help either of us. Go. Sleep. I’ll be seeing you, Bale.’
He stood up and she watched him leave, walking a little too steadily, his thick frame momentarily silhouetted in the watery shimmer of the doorway. Razer counted a few minutes away, then followed him out.
He wasn’t waiting for her. She was surprised to find herself vaguely disappointed.
She started to walk home, the alcohol mellowing Lookout’s disturbing s
treets. She was just sober enough to skirt the alleys of the Rut. Every town, city and port had its own version of Lookout’s Rut; an enclave of monitored illegality, permitted to exist on the unwritten understanding that the crimers inhabiting it didn’t draw too much attention to themselves. The Rut’s inhabitants were minor crimers who dealt in drugs but didn’t brew anything serious, who only emerged to commit street crime and small theft. Its existence suited Pax perfectly. Razer knew how they all operated, these crime valves. On Spindrift she’d spent a week in the alleys of Darknode for a TruTale, learning to skin IDs and to travel unseen, to misdirect and conceal, to look clean and fight dirty.
It was about time for her to leave Bleak. Bale and the stories she’d work from him were the best things about it. There was little else of real interest to her except, maybe, for the Chute.
Whatever else there might be for her in this place, she’d probably got by now. It all turned around the rigs and the bars. Everything was designed to keep the rig-constructors fit to work and on the edge of sober. The money brought them here, the work kept them busy and the bars kept them quiet. Pax kept them reasonably safe and straight. Ronen, the corporation running the rigs, conducted their industrial espionage in secret, never exercising Pax.
Razer knew a little about the rigs too, now. She’d talked to drinkers who had told her they’d been on the rigs, and she’d taken their stories, and she’d also been told they were liars, that no one who’d ever been on the rigs talked about it. One man she’d certainly believed, but the story had mostly been in his eyes and his silences. She’d offered to pay him, but the only return he’d accepted was a tale in exchange. So she’d told him a story she’d been given by a crimer who claimed to have survived the deletium swamps of Gehenna. Telling that helltale to a dead-eyed rigworker in the sweat of the Neverie bar, Razer had felt like a lost child.
She felt odd at the thought. A story for a story, the rigworker had said, and it had sounded like her kind of transaction. Like her life, even. Some kind of a life.
* * *
Back in her room, she fell onto her bed, closed her eyes and tried to sleep. When that failed, as it often did these days, she opened her screenery to AfterLife Live!
Holoman had just started. She left him chattering and made herself caffé, came back to the bed, pulled the covers to her chin and sipped the tasse in front of the display.
‘Hi, Razer. Good to see you again. Today’s show is a very special two-parter. First, an amazing AfterLife Past Tale, and then, on the Vote-Slot, a brand-new ballot. Hold on while I run quickly through the legal blahdery, and then I’ll show you the Past Tale – this one’s a real eye-opener.’
Holoman stepped off-screen as words began to scroll.
AFTERLIFE RESPONDS TO ALL ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH ANY PART OF ITS ARENA AND ASSOCIATED SYSTEMS WITHOUT NOTICE AND WITH ALL MEASURES IT MAY CONSIDER APPROPRIATE…
Eventually Holoman walked back on, smiled and wiped his creaseless brow. ‘Nearly done, Razer. Don’t go anywhere.’
‘Sure,’ she murmured. She was a registered worker for one of the ParaSites, and that was about as good as working for AfterLife itself, so couldn’t they give her a rest on the legals? She yawned. Maybe she shouldn’t have had the caffé. It was bound to kick in just as she was about to doze off in front of the screen. She needed to sleep.
Holoman indicated an image of a brain behind him and said, ‘Somewhere in here is the secret of AfterLife. The neurid. It’s quite undetectable. It is impossible to locate by knife, scan or scope…’
Razer half-closed her eyes and mouthed the litany along with him. ‘… Any attempt, or investigation considered by AfterLife to constitute an attempt, to detect the neurid will be subject to immediate response. This includes all neurological scans, investigations and neurosurgery that is not precleared with AfterLife.’
The screen cleared behind him. ‘There. That’s the boring part over. Now for our very, very special Special! The first part of today’s show, Razer, is the story of an ordinary-looking man. You may think you’ve heard his story before, but never, I promise you, like this.’
A man’s face came up on the screen, pock-skinned, a rack of even, discoloured teeth, hooded brown eyes. Razer instantly recognised him, as everyone in the System would recognise him; Ajeenas Rialobon, the AfterLife Killer.
Holoman was talking, but Razer didn’t need to listen. Like everyone else in the System, she knew every detail of the story.
Over the course of a decade, Rialobon had murdered more than two thousand drifters across the System. Since most of the victims weren’t immediately missed, his activities hadn’t been noticed for years. It was only after he’d been caught, when he gave up the location of his cryovault, stacked with skulls and neurosurgical tools, that his motive was discovered. He had been dissecting brains in search of the AfterLife neurid.
‘Of course, he failed utterly,’ said Holoman cheerfully. ‘It’s an impossible task. As it develops, the neurid merges with the host’s brain, and unless it is activated by trained AfterLife medicians using encrypted AfterLife bioputery, the neurid’s function and appearance are totally indistinguishable from normal brain tissue and activity.’
Holoman looked solemn. ‘Rialobon’s activity was only brought to light by skilled AfterLife daticians who identified a significant but unaccountable fall in the homeless population.’
He turned to a different cam and smiled. ‘It was a shocking discovery but a triumph for AfterLife. Our constantly ongoing audit suggested the presence of an active serial killer before a single body part was found. AfterLife gave Pax the data and the programs to pattern-track and eventually to catch the killer.’
The stark Pax symbol came up and fell away again. It made Razer think of Bale. Would he be asleep yet? She checked the time. Nearly four. The violet glow in her window was starting to be touched by daylight. She’d never sleep now. It was stupid to watch this. The Holoman Specials were never new, just old tales endlessly graphically reworked. She only really watched the pre-vote segment out of habit.
She wondered if she should call Bale and decided not to, and then for some reason she thought of Tallen. She’d felt bad about leaving him so abruptly for Bale, but that was sometimes the way of it. And since then, he hadn’t been in the bar when she had.
Holoman brushed a lock of shining brown hair from his eyes. ‘Allegations are frequently made that AfterLife favours the wealthy in its selectees. It does not. Nor could the ballots be rigged. All randomising programs are openly available. AfterLife maintains only one totally protected secret, and that is the neurid. Total protection of the neurid allows everything else to be entirely open. AfterLife is fully System-monitored and rigorously controlled.’ Holoman began to walk, the cam following him through blocks of pulsing data, murmuring voices fading up and falling away. She heard the clipped consonants of Vegaschrist, the glottals of Heartsease, voices of the old and the young, women and men, and the fragments of text swimming across the screen –
… The one thing that sustained me…
… She never realised…
… When he finally died…
As it all subsided, Holoman said, ‘Let’s look at the facts. There is a potential AfterLife neurid for every birth on every planet in the System except – of their own choice – Gehenna and the unsaid planet.’
Holoman was, as always, padding the so-called Special. Razer started working out how she was going to fit Bale into a TruTale. She always got good response figures when she put herself into them. A bit of sex didn’t hurt, either. And people liked to think they were learning something new on TruTales, just like they did with AfterLife, even if they couldn’t register a judgement on a TruTale. Bale’s reminiscences were heavy on violence and tech. It wouldn’t be hard to wrap a story around him.
Holoman had moved on to neurid-placement. ‘Parents may decline to participate on a child’s behalf, of course, though the statutory AfterLife tax cannot be revoked. In rare situations where facil
ities are not immediately available at birth, neurid-implantation can be carried out within the first year of life.’
The caffé was kicking in. She tried to start the Bale story in her head, but found herself thinking about his problems rather than his narrative potential. He lived for Pax. What would he be without it?
Was she worrying about him?
The possibility of that sat her up more than the caffé. She’d met more interesting men, and far more attractive than Bale. His stories were good and his bluntness was appealing, and that was all.
No, her only worry was that she might not gather everything Bale had to say before TruTales moved her on.
‘The neurid is pluripotent-cell-based, cheap to produce, and implanted via a simple cranial infiltration. Its production is subsidised by the System. The randomised distribution of placebo neurids is AI-moderated, although the overall use of placebos is diminishing year-on-year as new memory storage facilities are introduced, thus expanding the AfterLife database. The only person in the participating System who cannot be implanted is me.’ He passed a hand theatrically through his own torso, demonstrating his unreality, and finally returned to Ajeenas Rialobon.
Razer didn’t need to see the detail of Rialobon’s killings and capture again. Tonight there were a few brain images she hadn’t seen before, some new detail about a couple of the victims and a series of interviews with the suspiciously growing catalogue of people who claimed to have escaped Rialobon’s knives. Holoman said, ‘For Civil Liberty reasons, remember, AfterLife information is never made available to Pax or Justix. It is not even known whether Rialobon himself had an active neurid.’
She was still thinking about Bale. She was taking too long over him. So what if she liked his company? It was still work. Or maybe it was a rest she needed at the moment, a bit of conversation instead of her usual questioning and recording. The reason didn’t matter, though. She really should have finished with him by now. She’d already spent over a month in Lookout, far longer than she spent in most places.